“I think what’s important when you’re going to work with an agency is that you share a lot of the same personality traits, because a brand is really a reflection of our personality,” explains Goldberg. “So in this case, we actually liked the agency more than the idea they came up with. They seemed like a happy, energetic group of people. And that’s our brand. We’re a happy brand, which is not always the case in the fashion world. Fashion is often really serious and dark. We’re a little bit more tongue-in-cheek and friendly and energetic than a typical fashion brand, so we liked that about Neuron Syndicate. They seemed like people who lived life out loud and really embrace what comes at them and take things in stride and try to put things in their best light. It’s a positive perspective towards life in general, and we’re always trying to communicate relaxed and carefree.”

Goldberg notes that there are also tactical reasons for selecting an agency that embodies the qualities of your brand. “Somebody who really understands the personality itself and possesses its assets will know which levers to pull and how to find something that the public will respond to. We like to think that we have a very specific niche and a very specific point of view that is different than the rest of the marketplace. For some, it’s not easy to understand the nuances. But it’s really with the nuances where the differences start to fall. Like with our brand, we’re an island lifestyle brand. But with a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there, we could be at Gilligan’s Island pretty quickly. And that’s all wrong. But somebody with an untrained eye might look at that and say, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s on brand,’ because of a thatched hut and a tiki torch. They might not understand the levels and layers that we go through to communicate a more sophisticated lifestyle brand that’s a little bit more nuanced. We feel like Neuron Syndicate gets that. We thought that they were pretty current in terms of the business too. We saw a lot a great things around applications of ideas — not necessarily the ideas themselves, but how those ideas should be manifested.”